The Silverlake Era: Part 1--Unemployment

The Silverlake Era: Part 1 - Unemployment

                The Silverlake Era began on April 28, 2008 and ended August 26, 2008, so a little less than four months.  The decision to move there was the decision that killed my ability to survive in L.A.  Yesterday, I was thinking about how it was a mistake to move home—how I should have proved I could live on my own—but the loneliness finally became too crippling.  And though I may have appeared more “dateable” as a person living in their own apartment—a serious concern to be sure—I decided it would be better for me in the long run to move home again and begin to save up, because there was no way I would be able to save up under that current arrangement.  Mostly I owe this problem to the staffing agencies and the inability for me to stay long enough to move into a full-time position.  When I argued that I deserved unemployment when I was living in Silverlake, during my trial on July 18, 2008, the Accountemps representative who testified against me claimed that some people had worked at Jefferies for 3 years until they became permanent.  That was just not the type of career progression that seemed fair to me, but I fear that may be the situation for the majority of new job seekers.  Even after I had moved into a new position at a new company, July 14, I could not bear the thought of an indefinite period of bare sustenance.  But I will get into that later.

                Silverlake appealed to me for many reasons, not the least of which was the apartment, which was the cheapest place I could find in the city.  Advertised at $750, the size of the living space could not have been more than than 13’ x 7’ 91 square feet.  There was a kitchenette, which was better than what most “bachelor” units offered, and zero cabinetry, though there was ample shelving over the stove.  The bathroom was suitable, though it did not have a bath, only a shower stall. 

                There was another apartment I had considered—an $800 a month one bedroom in Echo Park, though I think it would be more fair to call that place downtown, and close to a sketchy part of downtown.  In short I felt a bit nervous parking my car there, and I didn’t think it would be a very pleasant area to walk around, nor was there anything to walk to.  This was a great apartment though—everything was perfect, including the man who would have rented it to me, Antonio.  There was a good-sized bedroom, a large living room, a full-sized kitchen, and a little deck on the back.  The only negatives were the neighborhood, the crowded parking situation, and the toilet.  The toilet was very close to the wall.  If you were to be sitting on it, your knees would have been very close to the wall.  I pictured it getting annoying and uncomfortable in the future.  However when I would later go to IKEA and attempt to furnish my space, I rued the day I picked something with such little surface area.  But I figured, I had everything I needed with me in my car, and I didn’t want to come into possession of too many things, or make the situation too permanent.  This may have also been a mistake in retrospect but I will never know.

                Kate rented me the apartment.  She was breaking her lease early.  She was pregnant, and moving in with her fiance.  The apartment had its own private staircase and porch and outdoor area, which greatly appealed to me.  It was right off of Sunset Blvd, and though not exactly a stone’s throw from the Sunset Silverlake Junction, it was about a mile from there, and much closer to the Echo Park part of Sunset.  In short, the hippest area in L.A.  Morrissey had lived there.  When I saw him live, he changed one of his lyrics to, “I’ve been through the hills of Silverlake” and everyone cheered.  Anais Nin had lived there.  It was the center of the L.A. underground music scene.  It was the equivalent to Chicago’s Wicker Park, or Brooklyn’s Williamsburg, two neighborhoods I wish I had moved to in earlier times.  This was my way of reclaiming my identity as a hipster.  Little did it matter to me that the management company raised the rent to $795 and that they wanted to charge me $56 for the last two days in April.  I had my own place!  And I was free to play my music and the guitar as loud as I wanted!

                I started moving my stuff in around April 25, and one day one of my neighbors was shooting a movie on the driveway.  I had my last couple of days at Jefferies driving to and from the apartment, and I tried taking the I-10 E to the 110-N to the 101-S, the preferred method to get from there to the ocean during light traffic hours, but an awful idea during rush hour.  It would have been better to just do what my partner Jeremiah had done.  He lived at Sunset and Western.  I lived at Sunset and Benton.  I was not more than two miles further down Sunset.  He made that commute everyday and went down Sunset.  I would give anything if I could go back to that day in late March or early April and never tell Maria that I had to go, because I might have been getting a job at UCLA on May 1, and I was moving to another neighborhood.

                I moved my stuff in and called Time Warner Cable to get my appointment for cable hook-up, and they missed the first date and it upset me greatly and we rescheduled for a week later, and so I did not get my internet until around May 11 or so, and the only visual entertainment I had at my disposal were DVDs on my laptop.  I wouldn’t get my TV in the mail until May 22^nd or 23^rd. 

                Before any of that, however, was an experience that may have foretold doom.  It happened right after I signed my lease and right before I started moving my stuff in.  The date was April 18, 2007.  I went to Amoeba Records in Hollywood to buy the Vampire Weekend album.  Everybody had been talking about it for the last month, and it was the #1 seller at Amoeba far beyond any others.  My friends were blogging about it, and I felt the urge to experience it and give my opinion, which was perhaps unfairly critical.  But this isn’t about my opinion of that album.  If you want to know what I said you can go to my blog.  No, it was the experience of buying it that mattered.

                I went my usual way to Amoeba—straight down Sunset—and unbeknownst to me, it was the night before Record Store Day, a new holiday unveiled in 2008 to celebrate record store culture and to hopefully boost a business which now appears secondary to online downloading.  The guy from Bauhaus and Love & Rockets would be DJ’ing the next day at the Hollywood location, and Jello Biafra would be hanging out at the San Francisco location.  I didn’t put two-and-two together and went the night before instead.  When I wanted a CD, it was like needing to buy drugs.  I wouldn’t put it off.  If I wanted it, I wanted it now.  So I went, and I bought the Vampire Weekend album, and I bought the debut by These New Puritans and the debut by Superchunk, for good measure.  The idea was to compare the three, with my pointing out that Superchunk are way better than Vampire Weekend, and even These New Puritans are way better than Vampire Weekend, except nowhere near as many people know them because of the marketing machine.  The point is, I had picked up all three, and I was idling around the aisles, about to make my purchase, not sure if I wanted to browse a little more, and I saw someone.  I saw someone that I used to know in Chicago. 

                She was in the aisle no more than ten feet in front of me.  When I noticed it was her, she seemed to look back immediately and make eye-contact, and to instantly recognize that it was me as well.  The last time we had talked, I had asked her if she had disappeared from the city.  Hurricane Katrina had just occurred and I thought she might have gone to New Orleans to volunteer.  No, she sent me a text message that said, “You have to stop calling.  Jon is tired of you staying at his place and I’m sick of you hitting on me.”  I wrote back to her, something like, well I had no idea you felt that way, I’m sorry and I hope we can still be friends.  Nothing after that.  For the record, I may have been hitting on her, but certainly not all the time, and it was only to see if she liked me.  It killed to receive that message though.  For about a month, I had hung out with her and my friend Jon and their whole posse from Grinnell College who had moved to Chicago.  I barely knew anybody else there, and I considered Jon one of my best friends.  This whole story is not for the telling here—it deserves its own lengthy short story—but it hurt my feelings very badly.  Later I heard from another friend that Jon had moved to L.A.  When I moved there, I knew he was somewhere, and I thought I would have to run into him eventually.

                I didn’t run into him, but I ran into her, whose name I should not even say, but it was Amanda.  And I regret what I did in that moment.  I walked into another aisle, as if to browse, while my mind was totally only on one thing—should I say hi?  I thought about it for a second and she moved on to some other area of the aisle, and I decided it would be better to just check out.  She had seen me and that was enough.  It could be a weird encounter for both of us.  I left and haven’t heard anything from any of them since. 

                We had done the same thing, moving from Chicago to L.A., and my guess is they lived in the same area of L.A. as me.  But that was all.  Later I saw a picture of Jon on facebook—he was the only person to “defriend” me on it—and he was standing in front of a store that had a 213 area code, which was the same for my home phone.  For a while I couldn’t access his page and then all of the sudden I could, and I thought about trying to get in touch with him, but it probably wouldn’t have led to anything.  Like I said, this is a story for another time.  But it proved to me that something very weird was going on. 

                I spent from May through July 14 unemployed.  Two and a half months.  In that time, I read a lot.  I applied to a lot of jobs.  I went to a networking event for ABC Disney, which ended up being a pitch event for a fellowship/internship position that paid $50,000 a year to write scripts for television.  It sounded like an MFA program, only much more competitive and promising of a successful future career.  That was a weird experience too, as I swore I saw my old high school classmate Lynn there and I went up to the girl just before I left and asked her if she was Lynn and she said no and was totally freaked out. 

                The most interesting job I applied for was to be an assistant to a talent agent.  They said it would pay $500 a week.  I asked if that was before or after taxes.  They said before.  I thought the interview went well except I probably shouldn’t have asked that question.  I needed to make about $1800 a month to live semi-comfortably, I figured.  The guy said, “I’m meeting with a million people today.”  The other people in the office who walked by me while I was sitting waiting for the interview looked unhappy.

                There was the interesting case of trying to be a “legal assistant” or “project assistant” and the terrible experience with Amy Kossouris.  She had contacted me for an interview and I was very excited.  She said not to worry about dressing up.  We set up the interview for 6:30.  I was walking around Century City after parking my car for free for 3 hours in the Westfield garage and getting confused about which particular street the building was on.  I stopped and asked a guy and he said, “Oh, the twin towers” and pointed me in the right direction.  I thanked him and he told me he knew I was going to get the job which struck me as uncanny and superstitious and extra good luck.  I went to the building and was a bit early, so I called up my family and talked to them randomly, telling my sister about how Century City was named after 20^th Century Fox, and went into the building at the appropriate time.  First, I waited for Amy to call back the front desk after requesting clearance to come up.  This was the latest interview I have ever gone on, though I appreciate the idea of people interviewing after normal business hours for people that already have jobs during normal business hours.  I waited, and then was finally admitted.  And then when I got to the floor, I waited more.  I don’t think we started the interview until about 7, or 7:15.  And she walked up to me like it was nothing.  She said, “Why do you look so surprised?” And I said, “I just didn’t expect to wait so long,” or something like that.  She talked to me in a conference room with a beautiful view.  She kept looking at me weird.  I wasn’t giving her the answers she wanted to hear.  At one point I started talking about how I felt like I had suffered from post traumatic stress disorder from witnessing 9/11 in New York, and felt a bit antsy at the moment for being in the “twin towers” in L.A.  She said, “Really?” in this sarcastic tone.  She was not interested.  I started telling her about how I had written a short story where a character goes into a 14^th floor office in Century City and gets interviewed and how I was now on a 14^th floor office and I had just written the story two days ago, and she cut me off, not interested, asking, “So what was your GPA?”  “3.62” I answered.  This was not a good interview.  I tried to be casual and colloquial and she tried to be cutthroat.  I asked her if she thought she would find anything for me and she said, “Honestly, I don’t think so.”  Then at the end as she was walking me out, she said, “If you go on the interview, don’t wear your sneakers,” in reference to my Converse.  I told her I wouldn’t.  There were strange apologies.  Oh, and she had kept telling me to make stronger eye contact.  “Why are you looking away?  I keep wondering what’s so interesting that you’re looking at.” I don’t think I have ever been on a worse interview.  I would still like to believe that the problem lies with her and not me.  People are not so judgmental normally. 

                Finally Accountemps hooked me up with another job.  Before that was a terrible struggle with much praying and some crying and hoping to die.  I also went running around the Silverlake reservoir, which I enjoyed.  And I also met a friend name Laura.  When I get into part two of this chapter of the story, I will talk about Laura.